After shooting her 36th film in almost half as many years, Christina Ricci trades reel life for two months' R&R in New Orleans.
Work is swell and all, but sometimes you just need a break. Take Christina Ricci, for instance. The actress has been working since she was 10 years old. That's when she made her first movie, Mermaids, costarring Cher and Winona Ryder. By the time she was 20, Ricci had made 25 more movies. Those included the two big-budget Addams Family pictures - you remember her as the creepy Wednesday Addams - and several edgy independent movies, Buffalo '66 and The Opposite of Sex among them. A recurring role on TV's Ally McBeal and 10 more films, including Monster, in which Ricci played opposite Oscar winner Charlize Theron, followed. Her 36th film, the just-released Wes Craven horror flick Cursed, hits theaters February 25.

Let's put that in perspective. Ricci has been an actress for 14 years, yet she's already made more movies than Tom Cruise has in his entire career. So who's going to begrudge her a little time off?

Not New Orleans. There, time off is more highly regarded than time on. So it makes sense that the actress recently spent more than two months vacationing in New Orleans while her boyfriend, Adam Goldberg (Saving Private Ryan), shot a movie there for the USA network. He worked. She, for the first time in a long time, didn't. "New Orleans is just so laid-back," Ricci says from her new home in New York's Chelsea neighborhood. "It felt like nobody was taking anything seriously. You don't feel like the city is about working. It's about relaxing and eating and hanging out."